Home & Roost sell hutches, runs and accessories for rabbits and other domestic pets. Seeking to expand on their success, they approached Plug & Play for a new eCommerce solution and a digital marketing strategy.
- Lead time:
- 4 Months
- Sector:
- Retail
- Target Type:
- B2C
- Demographic:
- Family Consumers
- Website Goal:
- Increase Online Sales
- Services:
- eCommerce Web Design, Digital Marketing
- Scope
- Resource
- 1x Brand Designer
- 1x Website Designer
- 1x Website Developer
- 1x Project Manager
- 1x Quality Assurance Tester
- 1x Marketing Strategist
- 1x SEO Specialist
- 1x PPC Specialist
Post-launch website results
In order to drive revenue for Home and Roost, we focused on delivering material improvements to their organic Google keyword positions, eCommerce conversion rate and Google Ad campaigns.
Challenge
When we started work with Home & Roost, their website was experiencing issues with page speed, lack of content and poor keyword targeting. As a result, their SEO was poor and their PPC campaigns were struggling with high costs and lower than expected returns. We overhauled their digital marketing strategy and rebuilt their website, delivering a significant return on investment.
Google Ads and conversion rate optimisation
After an initial review of Home & Roost’s existing Google Ads account we realised that we needed to rebuild their campaigns from the ground up. Within a few months, we were able to increase their revenue from PPC visitors by more than 146%. We achieved this by reducing their CPC (Cost Per Click) by 52% and increasing their PPC eCommerce conversion rate by 50%.
Improving display advertising
When we initially took control of the Home & Roost display advertising it was struggling with high costs, low click volume and poor audience targeting.
Following our work, year on year impressions were up more than 13%, clicks grew by more than 874% and the click through rate was up by about 758%. All of this was achieved with a negligible increase in the budget.
“Working with the team at Plug & Play has been a pleasure, their professional and positive attitude to whatever you throw at them is refreshing and from past experience most welcome. P&P’s desire to understand our business from the start of our relationship has enabled us to grow into new areas of the market we hadn’t considered before.
We see Plug and Play as part of our business family rather than an agency we use and look forward to the future as we go from strength to strength.”
The website
We delivered a WordPress website with WooCommerce to provide an elevated user experience to Home & Roost’s customers. Our team increased the accessibility of product pages and created an SEO strategy to guide the website structure and build.
The new website and marketing strategy was business-changing for Home & Roost, dramatically increasing revenue and creating a flexible platform for continued growth.
SEO optimised
We improved Home & Roost’s rankings by targeting valuable organic keywords that would drive sales. We assigned a keyword focus for each page and generated new engaging content. We created product page content to encourage search engine rankings and drive conversions.
Post-launch keyword results
Related work
Save the Student is a highly successful blog with millions of visitors per month, generating revenue through affiliate links and advertising. Our brief was to develop a modern, mobile optimised, responsive website that improved their on-page search engine optimisation with structured microdata and schema. We delivered a platform on WordPress that was highly scalable, easy to manage and maintain, that would build on existing SEO positions and look great across all mobile devices.
- Lead time:
- 6 Months
- Target Type:
- B2C
- Demographic:
- Students
- Website Goal:
- Generate Revenue
- Services:
- Web Design, Frontend Development, SEO
- Scope
- Custom Design
- WordPress
- Data Migration
- Speed Optimisation
- Digital Marketing Strategy
- SEO Consultancy
- Resource
- 1x Digital Marketing Specialist
- 1x Website Designer
- 2x Front-End Programmers
- 2x Back-End Programmers
- 1x Project Manager
- 1x Quality Assurance Tester
Engaging with students
The website had to bring their content to life, and needed to load quickly – especially on mobile devices that make up a large percentage of visitors.
For a publisher such as Save the Student, there’s huge value in the engagement of their readers. To increase their subscribed audience we introduced micro-interactions to increase newsletter subscriptions, as well as click-through affiliate links that create revenue.
Solution
It was important we didn’t alienate loyal readers with a significant visual shift, so our design team created a concept that remained in line with the existing Save the Student brand but with a modernised look and feel. The Save the Student purple is used throughout the website and is complimented by strong colours used to differentiate between each section.
Mobile first
With over a million visitors per month, the majority of which are on mobile devices, ensuring that the website interactions and call to actions were optimised for mobile was integral to this project.
Search engine optimised
Save the Student have a huge online footprint with high Google rankings for very competitive search terms. We needed to make solid recommendations to ensure that we built on this previous success with minimal risk.
Data migration
With thousands of legacy articles data migration was the biggest risk in this project. Our development team started the project with an initial migration of data so they were working with real content. Over the months, Save the Student continued to update their current site with their articles as the new website came together. After several rounds of rigorous testing it was time to impose a content freeze on the live site, run a final data migration and put the site live.
Related work
Thakeham are a Times Fast Track 100 company; a rapidly growing house builder based in West Sussex. They needed a website that could support their new brand and provide a content management system that would give the Thakeham marketing team the dexterity they need to manage their online presence.
- Lead time:
- 3 Months
- Sector:
- Construction
- Target Type:
- B2B and B2C
- Demographic:
- Home Owners
- Website Goal:
- Generate New Enquiries
- Services:
- Web Design, Web Development, On-going Digital Marketing
- Scope
- WordPress CMS
- Responsive Design
- Custom Back-End
- Rightmove Integration
- Zoopla Integration
- Property Search
- On-going Support
- Resource
- 1x Marketing Strategist
- 1x Digital Marketing Specialist
- 1x Website Designers
- 1x Front-End Programmers
- 1x Back-End Programmers
- 1x Project Manager
- 1x Quality Assurance Testers
Post-launch website results
We created and implemented a keyword strategy for Thakeham Homes which resulted in large improvements to organic keyword positions.
Thakeham came to Plug & Play looking for four individual websites to reflect their brand. One was to replace their current website, and three further sites were commissioned to launch sub-brands, segmenting their offering and enabling more specific customer targeting.
The Thakeham websites are primarily used to present new developments and homes that are up for sale. As such, the overall design and finesse required a complete overhaul to align Thakeham’s online presence with the quality of homes that they build and sell.
A flexible CMS
The result is the creation of four sleek and beautiful new websites with a common structure to provide brand consistency across the sub-brands. The content of each site has been aligned to the target audience, and the Thakeham marketing team has complete autonomy to make amends. The large quantity of content is displayed intuitively for the user, resulting in a polished user journey.
SEO
With the critical role that the Thakeham websites play in the house sales process, visibility in the search engines is imperative. Plug & Play undertook comprehensive research to produce a keyword strategy for each of the Thakeham websites to ensure that each was optimised for the most valuable customer searches. Keyword and conversion tracking were set up before go live to enable the Thakeham internal marketing teams to successfully track the results from marketing campaigns.
A comprehensive 301 redirect strategy was also implemented upon go live so that all returning visitors can navigate the site with ease.
Post-launch keyword results
“I have been working with Plug & Play for a couple of years – firstly for the delivery of our new company website, and now on a day to day basis liaising over website strategy, including content, SEO and new functionality.
The team at Plug & Play is a pleasure to work with – friendly, open and honest, very responsive – they have not let me down even when I think I am being really demanding! I highly recommend Plug & Play.”
Ongoing digital marketing retainer
Thakeham were keen to ensure they didn’t stand still once the new websites were live. We are continuing to work with Thakeham’s dynamic in-house marketing team on an ongoing basis, focusing on driving engagement and brand awareness through digital marketing.
